"Good News,” by
Edward Abbey, 1980
Abbey is the desert anarchist who
wrote while working as a park ranger around the Grand
Canyon. His fiction is
movie-like, featuring close escapes, somewhat cartoon villains and the struggle
against industrialism gone crazy. As he
puts it, it is about ultimately the ‘oldest civil war, that between the country
and the city.’ “Good News” is a
combination of “Don Juan, a Yaqui
Way of Knowledge,” Cormac McCarthy’s “The
Road,” Larry McMurtry westerns like “Lonesome Dove,” and “The
Road Warrior.” It is a post-apocalyptic look at the west after the collapse
of industrial capitalism, centered on a city wasteland, called Phoenix.
The book is prescient in its descriptions and has aged well. For instance, Abbey identifies the U.S. as a
former corporate oligarchy before its fall.
A catastrophe has destroyed the United States,
leaving broken-down cars, empty malls, shuttered stores and an absent
government. (And it wasn’t the 2008 financial crash!) In its place are the remnants of the
frightened citizenry and a megalomaniacal dictator called “The Chief” who wants
to not only reconstitute the United
States with his army of 2000+, and conquer
the rest of the world next, but go on to the planets and the universe, where he
will meet his ‘God.’ He plans to march
east and occupy Washington D.C. This
is a country, by the way, that has almost no fuel left, which must be carried
in massive tanker trucks. So,
monomaniacal times 3. The Chief lives in
a steel and glass skyscraper run by diesel generators in the middle of the
smoking ruin of Phoenix,
sort of like Sauron’s tower. The
skyscraper here has come to symbolize late-stage capitalism, like a pyramid
shining out of the past.
Why apocalyptic disasters do not
have clear causes is a mystery. Book or
film cannot name what actually happened.
Nuclear war? Other kinds of wars?
Environmental catastrophe or global warming?
Economic collapse? The end of
resources? The seizure of power by a
fascistic rich class? All you get are
crappy hints. This shows either cowardice or cluelessness, but in this case, Abbey is
neither. Abbey clearly says that
something about industrialism led it to a dead end – a lack of food as the land
was destroyed by industrial 'progress.’ He is a
deep ecologist, and posits a rural, agrarian existence based on small
landholdings as the counter-point to industrial society of any kind. The
“state” is the prime enemy, as in most anarchist fiction.
The struggle features an old
cowpoke and a Hopi shaman on horse-back, an impulsive young man, several tough,
good-hearted women and an anarchist guerilla leader against The Chief, his
sadistic motor-cycle thugs, his chosen #2 and various sad military
lackeys. One of the motorcycle cops,
Brock, is a relentless killer, torturer and rapist, who rides with a brutal
Apache. The Chief knows he is a
torturer, but says, prematurely channeling George Bush, that people like Brock
allow the ‘Chiefs’ of the world to have ‘clean hands.’ Brock is eventually dealt with … using magic. Resorting to magic, especially in a literary work,
indicates that even the likes of Abbey are impotent before vicious
violence.
Abbey includes a sub-story
involving the old cowboy, Burns, looking for his long lost son, who turns out to
be the Chief’s #2, Barnes. This search
does not go well. The anarchist guerrillas, who shout “Viva la Libertad” and
“Tierra o Muerte” before being hung (shades of the Spanish Civil War…) are led
by a professor named Rodack, and are mostly students, some Native Americans and
Chicanos. Portraying your anarchist guerrillas
as mostly young students might be a weak point.
Bad pop Muzak plays throughout the Tower and also during the executions on
“Unity Square,”
which seems named after someplace in Assad’s Syria. In contrast, a frustrated classical piano
player remembers Beethoven and Bach while being forced to play Dylan in a bar. Abbey, in laughable detail, names all the
closed shops that line the weed-grown streets when the collapse happened circa
1984 (!) – Victoria’s Secret, Holiday Inn, B. Dalton, 7-11, McDonalds, Checker
Auto Parts, Sambos, Denny’s, Food Giant, Odyssey Records and Tapes, etc. The head of the military bordello describes
the wonders of the vanished civilization to one of her new charges – eating all
the time, driving everywhere, dressing in nice clothes, air-conditioning,
entertainment, vacations, the Pentagon, drugs for every problem, power plants…
Abbey understood the problems of
western capitalism even in 1980, before the recent extreme take-off of
inequality and corporatism. His analysis
blames all of industrial society. Doing this he is unable to separate out the role
capital plays with the role ‘the city’ or ‘the state’ or ‘industry’ play in
that kind of economy, where they become key and oppressive aspects of
capitalist development. Take the city.
The growth of massive cities across the world is an outcome of the
concentration of capital, as monopoly destroys agrarian land by ownership and with
chemically-enhanced export mono-crops. The concentration of people mimics the
concentration of wealth. Present Phoenix, like Vegas and even Los Angeles, is
itself at risk, slated for destruction through lack of water, increased fires,
an influx of climate refugees and global heat waves from runaway climate
change. Who builds a massive city in the
middle of a desert? Only capital accumulation and lack of planning would lead
to something like this. Abbey is always
a rollicking good read. He refused to
remove politics from his literature, unlike the approved writers of purely aesthetic
fiction, and hence rises above them.
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic
film and fiction - “The Road,” “The Hunger Games,” “Blade
Runner or "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” "World War Z," and "Cloud Atlas" are reviewed below.
“The Monkey-Wrench Gang” by Abbey is also reviewed. Use blog search box, upper left.)
Red Frog
July 28, 2014
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